For all of the fashion industry’s glamour and refinement, it also has a grittier, less photogenic side that receives too little attention. In HBO’s “Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags,” which premieres tonight, documentary filmmaker Marc Levin mines the rich history of New York’s garment industry, which once thrived as an employer to thousands and now withers as jobs migrate overseas. “Schmatta” is a Yiddish word that means “rag.”

Levin, an HBO documentary film veteran, frames America’s economic and manufacturing woes through the prism of the garment industry. In 1965, 95% of American clothing was made in the U.S. Today, only 5% of American clothing is manufactured stateside.

Several high-profile designers, including Nanette Lepore and Anna Sui, have thrown their names behind a grassroots campaign to save New York’s garment center. Two days after the film’s premiere, on Oct. 21, the Save the Garment Center campaign will hold a noon rally at 39th St & 7th Ave. Speakeasy recently talked with director Levin about the film.

Wall Street Journal: If the garment industry is losing people who have worked in the business for generations, what happens to institutional memory?

Marc Levin: Without having some sense of the institutional memory of both people’s stories and the culture that came before us, it’s really difficult to figure out — how do we re-fashion and re-design an economy that works for us? The economy has no clothes, that’s my shorthand. We all thought we were entering a new post-industrial era where we didn’t have to make things, we didn’t need to save, we could use credit. Then we woke up one day and we realized we were broke and naked.

Everyone has to get dressed in the morning. So what do you do when 95% of clothes are not made in the U.S.?

We’ve got to get away from this binary choice that there’s nothing we can do or we have to be a part of [exploitation]. Yes, there are business reasons for making things cheaper and we have to find the way to help those countries and those industries raise the standards for their workers. In the end that helps us, it helps bring back some manufacturing.

How do you shop now?

I have to admit, I was fairly indiscriminate. I go shopping once every 5 years. It’s convenience, what’s closest fastest, get me out of there. I did, for the first time, look at labels on shirts and sports jackets after making this film. I’m as guilty as anyone. We rush through these things and we don’t fully think about how it’s all connected.

The film is very pro-union, which is a side we don’t see often, especially in fashion coverage. Why did you choose to focus on the union’s history?

For the kids that go to FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) and the young people that watch all the fashion television shows and read the magazines, it’s good for them to have some sense of where this came from– and that labor was part of that equation. Out of the garment center came all the ideas that became part of the New Deal. The period where labor was powerful during the post-war era of ’47 – ’75: That was the greatest expansion of the middle class, and the greatest equality of the wealth distribution in the Unites States. If we’re going to find a new way to the future we need to see how the battles were won and how this social contract was forged.